It has been a few days since our heroic walk at Birling Gap and the sense of achievement hasn’t left me. I have been telling anyone and everyone about it. And I was ready for the next adventure.

Luckily  the British are suckers for a charity event. Courtesy of my niece I travelled with her mother to London on Friday for a sponsored 10 mile walk around the city. And, this being England, it rained.

The train was true to form and we arrived at Charing Cross almost thirty minutes late. If I had a pound for every ‘signal failure’ that slows everything down, I would be doing rather well – and I am not a commuter! However, undeterred by the late arrival we made our way to the reception area just to find out that the walk had already started and everybody had gone. Cue mad dash down the street, trying to get the tracking app working. After a while we established that we were about a mile behind everybody. We stayed a mile behind for almost two hours…

Oh did I mention that it was raining?

When it was clear that we couldn’t catch up with the main group (and my niece), we simply did what we should had done at the beginning. We jumped into a black cab and said, ‘drive down this road until you come across a group of people led by a pink unicorn.’ The driver was only mildly amused…

We found them eventually. A jolly bunch of office workers who had been released from the office on a Friday and were therefore serious about having a good time. In true British fashion we marched through rain and cold past some amazing places and landmarks and for a while we even graced the swans of Hyde park with a song or two.

The singing was only interrupted when we suddenly entered the memorial of airmen who sacrificed their lives for Britain. There the atmosphere briefly changed and we were enveloped by a bubble of silence. I felt it too, as a lot of the war pilots were from the Czechoslovak army. They left behind their mothers, sweethearts and children and came over to fight on the side of the allies.

Talk about heroic…